Will Magazine Design Flourish or Fizzle on the iPad? Last week a parody of Dwell magazine made the viral rounds. Unhappy Hipsters consists of photos drawn from the magazine, each showing cool young homeowners looking forlorn in their expensive interiors. Tagline: “It’s lonely in the modern world.”
Thu Feb 4, 2010
Recession Style Watch: Introducing Industrial Rustic
A year ago, some designers reacted to the distress of the financial pages by borrowing imagery from farming and scenes of rustic subsistence, a style informed by the fear that we can no longer rely on banks and other institutions.
Wed Jan 20, 2010
Recession Style Watch: Introducing Industrial Rustic A year ago, some designers reacted to the distress of the financial pages by borrowing imagery from farming and scenes of rustic subsistence, a style informed by the fear that we can no longer rely on banks and other institutions.
The subtext seems to be that when people get scared their impulse is to strip everything away from their previous lives and go back to basics.
Wed Jan 20, 2010
Death to Dead Ends: Will the New Suburbia Omit Cul-de-Sacs? What could be more American than the suburban cul-de-sac, that leafy and lonely fixture of post-war development? They're under attack. Is the criticism justified?
Posted Tue Dec 29, 2009
Homes on Stilts: The Last Architecture Trend of the Decade Why stilted? Whatever their actual environmental benefit might be, stilts express a culture-wide desire to tread lightly on the land. They’re also a throwback to the virtuously simple tropical huts and the early days of prefab.
Posted Wed Dec 9, 2009
Aspen Report: The TED-Types Roll Up Their Sleeves for Social Design Two years ago, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York displayed 30 humanitarian design and engineering projects, including a biodegradable shelter, a low-tech food cooler, and a straw that helps prevent the spread of cholera and typhoid. They were exhibited, incongruously enough, on the back lawn of the museum's headquarters, the former Carnegie mansion on Fifth Avenue.
Posted Tue Nov 24, 2009
Can Design Thinking Solve Your Problems and Make You Happier? Imagine for a moment that a business needs a radically innovative approach to a vexing problem. Designers and managers start with an intense focus on the human aspect--the real problems their customers face in daily life. Somebody gives the obligatory talk about out-of-the-box thinking. Then they step back--way back--and let creativity, not the cold exigencies of logic, reframe the problem. When it works, this process can lead to startling new solutions. In the parlance of the moment, this is called "design thinking."
Posted Tue Nov 17, 2009
The Post-Big Era: Will Small-Scale Ingenuity Replace Large-Scale Architecture? The extra-large architectural complex--art museums, libraries, office complexes--built so prolifically over the past decade are commonly described as expressions of civic pride. They might just as easily be called grandiose expressions of runaway prosperity and municipal vanity. Whatever you call them, shrinking government revenue and newly parsimonious corporate donors have combined to bring the curtain down on mega-projects. Welcome to the post-big epoch.
Posted Tue Nov 10, 2009
Blu Dot Drops Chairs on NYC Streets; Tracks Movements, Cool, but is it Marketing? At 9:40 a.m. on Thursday, a white van pulled over near the corner of 68th Street and Central Park West in Manhattan. A cameraman armed with a telephoto lens watched from the corner. A video crew snooped from a rooftop. Half a dozen operatives on the street murmured discretely into walkie-talkies, calling each other "Hound Dog," "Crow's Nest," and other code names. Within minutes Andrew Haarsager, an interaction designer with the technology firm Tellart, removed a white steel chair from the van and placed it on the sidewalk.
Posted Fri Nov 6, 2009
Curbside Marketing: Blu Dot to Drop Free Chairs on Sidewalk and Track the Takers Here's one for the annals of experimental marketing: On Wednesday and Thursday a white van carrying a stack of powder-coated Real Good chairs by Blu Dot, a Minneapolis design firm started by three college friends, will patrol Manhattan neighborhoods dropping the chairs one-by-one on the street. No promotional material or sales pitch will accompany the drop-offs. The chairs will be free for the taking.
Posted Thu Oct 29, 2009
From Overwrought to Overly Simple: Is Green Design Anti-Style? Like everyone else, the design field braced for the fallout from the financial meltdown. At the time, some of us argued that good things could come from a period of constraint and reexamination. The consumer culture of design had become overwrought, with limited edition candleholders that sell for $2,700.
Posted Wed Oct 28, 2009
Return of La Buena Vida: Conran Poised for Cuban Invasion Sir Terence Conran, the designer and founder of the Conran Shop, has made preparations to design a dozen hotels and resorts in Cuba.
Posted Tue Oct 27, 2009
5 Ways Design Thinking Can Raise the Collective IQ of Your Business A panel held as part of National Design Week addressed ways to integrate designers, and design thinking, into organizations that usually resist change.
Posted Thu Oct 22, 2009
Romancing Ruin: Four Radical Rehabs Thirty years ago, in the badass seventies, the warehouse loft was cutting-edge real estate. The loft was then the height of bohemian cool; now it seems tame and utterly conventional. The conversion of offbeat industrial spaces--designers call it ‘adaptive reuse’--has moved on to more adventurous ground as architects and developers try to preserve the past and keep building materials out of landfills. As these five projects illustrate, the art lies not in what’s removed but in what industrial memory is preserved, and how it’s woven among new materials.
Posted Thu Oct 15, 2009
Can Designers Stamp Out Rural Poverty? Designers, corporate leaders, foundation heads and journalists meet next month in Aspen to solidify plans for a national design center in Alabama to study and alleviate rural poverty.
Posted Tue Oct 13, 2009
